The Record That Changed My Life: Pepper Keenan of Down Discusses Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'

“That album was a paradigm shift for me. Back then, in the early Eighties, I was mostly into punk rock, like the Ramones, and I dabbled in a little Robin Trower and Black Sabbath here and there, but The Wall just shifted everything for me. I saw The Wall movie in ’82, before I really knew the record, and it was so overwhelming on the senses that it started getting me into the songwriting aspect of music and not just the one-dimensional rock and roll that I was into at the time. Everything that Pink Floyd encompassed on The Wall—the sounds, the textures, the storyline—changed everything I thought I knew.

“I started playing acoustic guitar after that, learning different types of things and not just beating the E chord to death like I had been. It amazed me that it was Pink Floyd’s 11th album and that they could still be that prolific after all that time. It was very inspiring to me.”